Bohemian Rhapsody review: We will rock you? Not with this sanitised Freddie

Matthew Norman26 October 2018

With every biopic, whoever the subject, the critical question is the same. Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy?

Bohemian Rhapsody is a mishmash of the two. Part factual account of Queen’s ascent to the rock pantheon, part misguided laundering of Freddie Mercury’s personal history, it trundles towards the partial redemption of a soaring finale at the 1985 Live Aid concert.

Better late than never. But, oh! my great aunt Ada, what an anodyne cop-out to reduce a man of infinite flamboyance and indulgence to the almost mundane.

It is debatable whether Mercury, who treated interview requests like glowing lumps of plutonium, would have sanctioned the use of the songs for this borderline jukebox musical.

Queen’s three survivors did, and the influence of two as executive producers apparently contributed to the difficulties. Sacha Baron Cohen was originally cast as Mercury, but walked out allegedly because Brian May and Roger Taylor wanted much of it to cover the band’s career after Mercury’s death from an Aids-related illness in 1991.

Star performer: Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury in the new film

If so, one appreciates the desire for recognition. With all four members uniquely in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, it must be vexing that Mercury’s domineering charisma confuses non-aficionados into mistaking Queen for a one-man band.

Disabusing us of that are so many scenes of the Other Three composing anthems that the full title might be Bohemian Rhapsody: OK We Didn’t Write That One But We Did Write Plenty So It Wasn’t All Freddie, Much As We Loved Him.

And, for all his mounting imperiousness, love him the Other Three do. So they should, because when Mercury (Rami Malek) approaches guitarist May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Taylor (Ben Hardy) after a gig, a convenient few seconds after the singer quit, they and John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) are in a student band called Smile on the road to nowhere.

May then pitches Queen to a record label as four misfits making music for other misfits. But it wasn’t. It was three conventionally suburbanite white boy rockers and one magnificent misfit — a poor boy from a poor family that fled exotic Zanzibar for grim Middlesex; a closeted genius with a grandiose sense of destiny to horrify his father.

In 1970, the former Farrokh Bulsara is a design student moonlighting as a Heathrow baggage handler who talks with a mannered posh drawl, and sings with the astounding four-octave range he weirdly ascribes to the four extra incisors in his mouth.

If only there was an Oscar for Best Orthodontic Prosthetic. Orally, Malek is the spit. Otherwise, lacking Mercury’s concave-cheeked beauty, he looks as much like him as the late Arthur Mullard.

Malek hurdles that barrier to give a credible turn as an artist who feels truly alive only when playing a wild exaggeration of himself.

But fine performances from him and The Teeth, with strong support from Lucy Boynton as unlikely girlfriend Mary Austin and Tom Hollander as the band’s lawyer, are weighed down by the prissiness.

If you’re making a picture called Bohemian Rhapsody about someone Elton John said out-partied even him, you really have to show the bohemian. Everyone knows about the parties serviced by dwarves with salvers of cocaine on their heads, and the capacious carnal appetite.

Everyone, apparently, other than writer Anthony McCarten and directors Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher (not credited as such after replacing the fired Singer). They sanitise him beyond recognition.

Freddie drinks and pops the odd pill, and develops a taste for moustachioed Irishmen. But that’s as outrageous as it gets. He spends more time at home with his cats than showing due reverence for the first two thirds of drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll.

The film handles the rock well enough, especially in the composition and recording of the title song. But where in indecency’s name are the sex and drugs?

For two hours, the film runs through its checklist of the items (some factual, others fantasy) it regards as seemly. Freddie falls for a girl, discovers he prefers boys, becomes a megastar, gets cocky, goes solo, regrets it, gets humble, begs them to take him back, and coughs blood.

Queen's 10 greatest tracks

1/10

Piercing the retrograde aura of made-for-TV competence are some laughable decisions. Is it likely that such a rich man with such a recognisable face who so fiercely guards his privacy would go to an NHS hospital for his diagnosis?

In real life, Mercury didn’t learn he was infected with HIV until 1987. In this fantasy he gets the terrible news in 1985, just in time to decide that Queen should play Live Aid at Wembley.

Biopics are entitled to tweak chronology. Playing Live Aid because Aids leaves him little time to live may have ghoulish verbal symmetry, but why invent a motive for an obviously kind-hearted native of east Africa to help the starving of east Africa? Yeuggh.

Only on the Wembley stage does the movie come alive, as Mercury shrugs off a throat virus to give what is widely regarded as the greatest rock performance of all time.

If familiarity renders it less electrifying than Lady Gaga’s stage epiphany in A Star Is Born, Malek’s microphone-waggling, stage-prowling, lip-synching rendition of the track from which she took her name, alongside other classic anthems, justifies a portion of the ticket price. But no more than half.

Nothing really matters with a biopic like its commitment to the truth. This one scurries away from it like a scandalised maiden aunt from an orgy.

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